My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 170: The Bureau Offered Me a Leash and I Made Them Hold the Other End

The Bureau came on a weekday morning, which was itself a message.

Three officials in continental gray, walked into the Class Z common room where the pack was eating breakfast, and the senior of them asked, politely, if there was somewhere they could talk.

"Here’s fine," Soren said, and didn’t stand, and Maren didn’t take her leg off the chair arm, and the officials looked at the available seating, which was a bench with a mole asleep on one end of it, and sat.

They had come to him.

Everyone at the table could do the reading.

The senior official laid a folder on the table, face up, which Joan had taught him meant they wanted it read in front of them.

"Reclassification," the woman said. "Effective on signature. Class Z is re-designated as a primordial response asset, continental registry, with standing authority over the containment site beneath the east yard."

Soren read the folder without touching it.

The language was clean, drafted by people who’d learned from a year of watching him read their drafts.

Class Z would keep its structure, its housing, its roster.

In exchange, the pack held the grave.

Monitoring it, maintaining the seal, responding if the seal failed.

"You’re deputizing us to guard the thing you buried under us," Soren said.

"We didn’t bury it."

"No. You didn’t." He let that hold a second. "You just found out this month it was there, same as your inquiry did, and now you need someone standing on the lid who’s already proven they can, because the alternative is explaining to three continents why you’re shipping a primordial excavation team into a school."

The senior official didn’t confirm it.

She didn’t have to.

Institutions wrote generous terms for exactly one reason, and the reason was never generosity.

"The terms are favorable," she said.

"The terms are yours." Soren slid the folder back across the table. "Here are mine."

Soren gave them the list without notes, because he’d been building it since the verdict posted.

"One. No monitor writ. The post dissolves. Any observation of this class goes through a named liaison with a public mandate, and the pack approves the name."

The officials wrote.

"Two. The east yard is ours. Not shared custody, not oversight with Bureau veto. Access to that ground goes through me, including yours, and every entry gets logged in a system my people run."

He nodded at Dani, who did not look up from her terminal and was already building it.

"You’ve seen what her logs did to the last office that watched us. Consider that a feature you’re purchasing."

"Three. Dani Sloan’s attachment to this class is permanent and protected. Whatever registry language you need to make an affiliated student untouchable, draft it, and she reads the draft before I do."

"Four."

He looked at the senior official directly.

"Joan Sawyer’s designation stays exactly as it is. The question mark is not a vacancy. Nobody converts it, audits it, or measures it. It’s ours. Write that down in whatever grammar the registry can hold, but write it."

The official’s pen paused on the fourth one.

"The registry doesn’t have a category for an unmeasured linkage."

"Then the registry is about to grow," Soren said. "You came here because my class handles things your categories can’t. That’s the asset you’re registering. The question mark comes with it."

◆◆◆◆

They caucused by the window for four minutes.

Soren drank his coffee and watched Joan across the table, because had not said one word since the officials walked in.

She was watching him negotiate her designation.

Her face was doing something he had no shelf for.

He’d catalogued Joan’s faces for a year, the Bureau flat, the folder-turn, the dry line before the dry joke.

This one was none of them, this one was older than all of them, a face from before he knew her, aimed at him across a breakfast table while strangers by the window decided what grammar she’d be held in.

She caught him reading her and did not put the face away.

She held it, steady, across the table, for exactly as long as she chose to, and then she picked up her pen and went back to the Bureau’s draft, and the face folded into the working one without a seam.

That, too, went on the count.

◆◆◆◆

The Bureau took the terms.

All four, with edits Dani struck out inside the hour and language Joan rewrote by hand at the table, and by noon the folder went back into the gray coats signed, countersigned, and materially different from the version that had arrived.

At the door, the senior official stopped.

"For the record, Kane. The Bureau considered four approaches to this class." She buttoned her coat. "This was the only one where we kept anything."

"I know," Soren said. "I read the other three in your opening offer."

She almost smiled, and left, and the continental gray went out of the Class Z common room, and the room understood at the same moment that it was over.

Not the morning. The year.

The Council was a signature under Soren’s terms.

The shell was frozen, the office dissolved, the monitor was theirs, the buyers gone, the delegate flown, the son deregistered, the father performing cooperation on three continents.

Maren said it first, upside down, to the ceiling.

"There’s nobody left to fight."

"There’s nobody left to fight in a room," Soren said.

◆◆◆◆

That night he stood at the window with the count.

He walked it top to bottom, striking the settled lines.

Fan-club spike, settled, purchased.

Hearing, settled, purchased.

Festival, purchased.

Buyers, press, delegate, credentials, all of it hanging off the frozen shell, purchased, purchased, purchased.

What remained was short and had been getting shorter and heavier all season.

An account founded before any of its purposes existed. A coordinate pre-filled in a hand no office claimed.

Chains oiled on a schedule no office of theirs had ever recorded. A god-piece that recognized his wolf.

A pack whose secrets he was collecting one melting fern at a time.

Every purchased thing had traced to an owner.

The unpurchased things all traced to each other.

He looked out at the east yard, at the pale patch where Selah’s plug held the ground shut, and the year of enemies was over, and the count was not, because the count had stopped being a list of what was being done to him.